


look for the helpers

by starandrea



Category: Power Rangers (2017)
Genre: Gen, Post-Aftershock, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-23 21:52:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11998674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starandrea/pseuds/starandrea
Summary: For reasons known only to them, the Power Rangers have chosen to remain anonymous.  So many of the people who know them - the people who help them - will be anonymous too.  (Story inspiration by noxelementalist.)





	look for the helpers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noxelementalist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxelementalist/gifts).



Angel Grove has been through a lot these last few weeks. The gold killer, the giant monsters, the less giant leftover monsters. The destruction of large swaths of the downtown area. People dead, families and businesses displaced, fear and uncertainty clawing at everyone who’s left.

Federal agencies that turned out to be at least as interested in identifying the town’s vigilante defenders as they are in providing aid.

She doesn't know why identification is so difficult: there were hundreds of cameras trained on them during the first sighting, and they've been seen several times since. The town’s defenders are clearly visible in the cockpits of their colored war machines, and they have helmets that only sometimes cover their faces. Facebook can name someone from a partial profile of their face in a crowd, but there's no app that can identify the Power Rangers?

It's possible that she thinks it's easy because she's done it. She assumed they were military at first, like everyone else. When federal agents started asking questions, though, it was obvious the government had no idea who they were either.

Private citizens, then. A daredevil group with an entrepreneurial investor, or security for the rich with an interest and something to prove. Everyone has their favorite explanation, and some of them aren’t bad. But every argument she's heard assumes the fighters are adults.

Civilians too often forget that wars are fought by the young. And in retrospect, the Power Rangers have clearly been enhanced. It's not all armor, and young bodies handle change better than old.

It’s circumstantial evidence at best, of course. Like the colors worn by a group of students who’d never looked at each other twice before the gold killer appeared. Like the way they were all truant the day the Power Rangers first appeared, even if half of their parents called in excuses after the fact. 

(Not the girls’ parents, she wonders now? She thought girls were the ones who talked to their mothers, but it’s the boys’ moms who call in. It makes her study her own children’s behavior more carefully.)

Five students have banded together, across social and financial stratification, to take on schoolyard bullying and take over Saturday detention in the process. They defend freshmen and geeks and former jocks, patrolling the hallways without fighting and recruiting help with free snacks. And all the other teachers do is gossip: Kim Hart and Jason Scott have fallen from grace, Zack Taylor must have changed his mind about dropping out. Billy Cranston and Trini Kwan should stick to studying and keep their heads down.

Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe it's related, but only in the way that the town’s defenders are inspiring a lot of people to pitch in and help out. Maybe this is what teenagers can do: make Angel Grove’s still-standing high school a safer place for kids who are clinging to normal by their fingertips.

Or maybe teenagers can do what adults couldn’t, taking on a danger so foreign no one else even believed in it and throwing it off the planet for good. 

She knows what she believes, and she volunteers for weekend detention duty as often as she can. She can't cover all of them: her children have Saturday morning activities that deserve at least as much attention as Angel Grove’s unlikely heroes. But she can be there enough to make sure they have a friendly face once in a while, free breakfast for the room, and a break from “Better Choices.”

It isn’t saving the world, or even the town. It won't transform the school or turn their lives around. They're already doing that on their own.

It's what she can do.


End file.
